Rapid Rig 1.0.0

Been a while... but this is the fruits of my labour. I have been building an auto-rigging tool for a full character. After using my cartoony arms and legs, I realized that they are not conducive for a normal bi-ped. Just too many joints to have to paint weights for in the arms and legs. Also, they are so complicated that they could really only be posed completely straight when setting up the rig.

That being said, I have created my first full character auto rig. IK/FK switch, squash and stretch and orientation controls in the arms and legs, layered ik under fk for the spine, fully scaleable rig, with a few other bells and whistles.

It is available for purchase here! It makes the perfect gift for that special animator!

You can see a quick demo of just how the rig works here!

Leg Rig

Alright, so I am taking a break from my landscaping to give a quick update.

So I started building a leg rig, and right away, I knew I couldn't use everything from my arm rig, due to the direction it was built, etc. etc. But it gave me a great starting point. Also, while building the leg I found a lot of problems that I never noticed in the arm, so it gave me a chance to test out all aspects of the rig. But aside from fixing bugs, I also added some new features, some of which wound up in my old arm rig. The biggest one being volume control for the squash and stretch to give more control over how the volume changes when the joint chain squashes or stretches.

My tidbit of advice for this blog? Don't try to make the most complicated thing all in one pass. You will almost always fail and get frustrated. Chew off bits at a time, get one thing working properly, test it. Start adding more features to that. And just keep layering. If you do it this way, you will have more luck and more fun with it.

Here's a link!

Creating Controls Off-Axis

So... Some more really dull stuff, how to control joints that are at different angles. Woohoo!
Part 1
Part 2
Basically, this is 3 different ways of setting up control for joints where you can have the control angled, but still have zeroed rotations. This is so much more exciting than all that non-technical, artistic stuff...

And as an added bonus, I show how to parent shape nodes to transform nodes, oh joy!

Overthinking...

Alright, so one of the things I seem to do is overthink things when it comes to the technical rigging stuff. Trying to come up with something overly complicated to do a simple task. But that usually ends up becoming too complicated to rig, not to mention too complicated to use the damned thing.

But I still have to explore these options and test things and be creative. And if I keep plugging at it, eventually I can come up with something elegant and simple. And then just add levels of control to that.

That being said, I think I have come up with the best solution for the spine. It will be FK, but I may add in that extra level for IK. More to come...

Curvy, Stretchy IK/FK Arm

Ok, so... this is something that has been eating up a fair amount of my time. I was inspired by Horton Hears a Who to build an arm that has a nice curvy ability, and can stretch, and switch between inverse kinematics and forward kinematics.

I wrote a script that automates all the setup. The script just requires the joints. Now, right now, it only works for an arm that is built straight, and parallel to grid, and the character has to be facing in the +Z axis. I know not everyone builds characters like this, but it's the way I do it, so it works for me.

I am by no means an expert at scripting. I pretty much just copy and paste out of the script editor as I do the work, and tweak it.

Quality is pretty poor, so I have uploaded a higher quality one to Youtube


Any comments and suggestions are appreciated!

First Post...

Alright, well here goes....

I am lucky to be an artist at BioWare here in my home town of Edmonton. I work with some of the most amazing people in the industry.

Before that, I taught 3d stuff and freelanced. So I figure I would try to give something back to the community that I have learned a great deal from. That being said, I am going to post some tutorials and screenshots and other things of that nature that might help people out.

One of my goals is to create a rig, or even an auto rig, for animators. So anyone willing to be a beta tester is welcome to what I have to offer!

Unofficial Disclaimer: These are just things that I have learned, and are by no means perfect, nor necessarily the best way of doing things. Feel free to message me if you have any comments and criticisms, or even suggestions and questions for future posts.